After Many Tests I Found the One
I was always someone who didn’t have a strong sense of self-esteem, especially when it came to love. I always expected to be saved, to be completed. When I was 21, I moved from Paris to Montreal and I met my first serious boyfriend. It was very intense and passionate, everything I had thought love would be. We even talked a bit about getting married down the road. Two years later, he broke up with me right before we were supposed to fly to France together to spend Christmas with my family. I was completely shattered.
My already fluttering sense of self-worth was obliterated. I lost 15 pounds in 2 weeks. It was really ugly. Instead of thinking that it was the end of a love affair, as it happens everywhere for everyone, I imprinted it as “I am not worth loving”. It took me years to get over it and fully recover from the deep depression and sadness that followed. From 23 to 38 years old, I had many relationships that were never, ever what I truly wanted. Always with emotionally unavailable men, younger men who did not know what they wanted, self-absorbed artists, narcissists who were attracted to my intensity only to bring it down, exotic, foreign photo-journalists who did not want to commit (and communicated that very clearly to me) and on and on. In 2011, the last straw was a New York architect who treated me like absolute s**t, obnoxious and insensitive. After a few months of “dating” him, I just threw in the towel. I stopped answering his emails cold turkey.
Something in me had just snapped. I would not accept men like this anymore in my life. One afternoon, as I was researching self-portraits on Instagram for inspiration for characters in the novel I was trying to write, I went through hundreds of pictures when suddenly I saw a face that stopped me dead in my tracks. It was a face that I felt was made for me. Beard, dirty blond hair, freckles, very actor from the ‘70’s, gaze lost in thought. I started following him, without any expectation whatsoever because he was living near Washington DC and had pictures of two kids (5 and 7 at the time) on his feed so I thought he was married. He started following me too and a few weeks later, we started writing to each other about NYC where he was spending the day for work and it lead to more conversations about books and literature.
We started emailing, I found out he was divorced. We started sending each other the most authentic, fully vulnerable and open little audio memos every day until we decided it was time to meet in real life to see if the budding chemistry would hold. It’s hard to explain but I think both of us knew before meeting that we had fallen in love with each other. We met in NYC for a weekend and never looked back. I felt I was finally seen and loved and valued for exactly who I was, my intensity, creativity and my high sensitivity. The tests were in the form of the most exhausting and draining long distance relationship, the immigration process and the need to let go of my environment (friends, dream job, family) in Canada to moving to the U.S. We got married in 2013 and now have an amazing 3-year old son named Noah.
The relationship has never been “easy” but it has been the most rewarding and passionate of my life. I feel that the moment I said “enough” to the universe and stepped into my worth in love, the universe showed up.
